Superstorm Sandy devastated the mid-Atlantic and northeastern U.S. states with 72 direct deaths in the region and over $50 billion in damage. This podcast looks back at the storm with interviews from Long Island, New York.

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Transcript:

00;00;02;26 - 00;00;30;08
Hal Needham
Ten years ago this week, a hurricane named Sandy tracked up the east coast of the U.S.. Sandy experienced some complex changes as it turned toward the northwest and approached the eastern seaboard of the mid-Atlantic states. It lost its warm core and tropical characteristics grew tremendously in geographic size and slightly weakened, making landfall in southern New Jersey as a post tropical cyclone with maximum sustained winds of 70 knots or 81 miles per hour.

00;00;31;01 - 00;01;01;15
Hal Needham
Because it lost its tropical characteristics before making landfall, we usually refer to this storm as Superstorm Sandy when talking about its landfall and impacts on land in the mid-Atlantic and northeastern states. Instead of Hurricane Sandy, Sandy's huge Winfield enabled the storm to generate a record breaking storm surge in the region. Water levels in both New York and New Jersey reached as high as nine feet above ground level, sometimes accompanied by large destructive waves, according to the official National Hurricane Center report.

00;01;02;04 - 00;01;33;18
Hal Needham
The water level at the Battery on the southern tip of Manhattan reached around 14 feet above mean lower low water or more than four feet higher than the previous record flood level set in December 1992. This catastrophic storm inflicted widespread damage along the coastline, particularly in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. The National Hurricane Center report states the storm was responsible for 147 direct deaths, including 72 in the mid-Atlantic and northeastern U.S. states.

00;01;34;06 - 00;02;02;20
Hal Needham
Preliminary monetary damages reached at least $50 billion, according to the NHC report, making it the second most costly tropical or opposed tropical cyclone at the time. This is a good time to look back at Sandy to hear stories both about its destruction and recovery efforts to help impacted communities rebound. Last autumn, I conducted several interviews on the ground in communities impacted by Sandy along the southern shore of Long Island, New York.

00;02;03;01 - 00;02;23;23
Hal Needham
We've compiled compiled these interviews into this podcast. Hey, everyone, this is Dr. Hal, host of the GeoTrek podcast. In this episode, we're going to look back at Superstorm Sandy and really have a lot of lessons learned and talked to some witnesses that were right there on the ground and really saw the impacts of the storm the day of the event and also helped with the recovery.

00;02;24;15 - 00;02;50;27
Hal Needham
I recorded these interviews in the early days of the podcast when I did not have as much audio recording equipment. They were recorded videos on my iPhone and I had to keep each segment relatively short. So there's a bit of choppiness in some of the transitions, but we've done our best to kind of smooth those over. The good news, however, is that we have a lot of great video clips to share with our listeners on Jio Trek social media channels which are uploaded to Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

00;02;51;13 - 00;03;15;17
Hal Needham
Before we get into these conversations, a bit about the podcast. GeoTrek investigates the impact of extreme weather and natural disasters on individuals and communities. Our goal is to help you improve your decision making, risk assessment and communication related to extreme events so you can take action to make yourself, your family and your community more resilient. Hey, before we get into this episode, a quick favor to ask our listeners.

00;03;15;21 - 00;03;38;16
Hal Needham
We'd really appreciate it if you take just a moment to subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast platform. Your subscription helps us make progress, which enables us to make more professional partnerships moving forward and ensures many more episodes of the Jio Trek podcast in the future. As usual, Jio loves to get on the ground and take you, our listeners, on a journey to another place in time.

00;03;38;27 - 00;04;02;09
Hal Needham
So let's get on the ground together on the southern shore of Long Island, New York. It's a cool, gray day with a raw wind blowing off the ocean. Listen closely and you'll pick up cues to our location in such podcast. For example, you can hear a plane passing overhead during our Breezy Point segment of this podcast that gives you a little taste of the energy of this place where planes approaching New York City's JFK Airport sometimes fly overhead.

00;04;02;19 - 00;04;29;20
Hal Needham
Our first guest this week is Jim Carson, a firefighter who shared Superstorm Sandy stories with me while we walked around Breezy Point, a community in the Rockaways region of Queens County, New York. This area is a beach community on Long Island in the southeastern region of the greater New York City metro area. I found the area to be fairly densely populated for a beach community with single family residential homes pressed closely together and separated by walkways.

00;04;30;07 - 00;04;44;01
Hal Needham
The patriotic and civic civic minded spirit of this community was evident from the many American flags on people's homes, as well as signs that showed support for police and firefighters. I even saw signs commemorating 911.

00;04;46;08 - 00;05;08;28
Speaker 2
In Manhattan here. And then we have the Atlantic Ocean about a mile south of here, and between the flooding and the storm surge. The bay and the ocean basically met. And it was just such heavy storm water coming.

00;05;09;02 - 00;05;10;12
Speaker 3
Jim, this is Jamaica Bay.

00;05;10;21 - 00;05;14;00
Speaker 2
This is Jamaica Bay, New York.

00;05;14;00 - 00;05;14;26
Speaker 3
And you can see New York.

00;05;14;26 - 00;05;19;17
Speaker 2
In New York Harbor, as is that entrance. And it's Coney Island. I know you can make out that little parachute.

00;05;19;17 - 00;05;24;23
Speaker 3
Jump, that little section with its flat top is Coney Island up there. And then there's Manhattan.

00;05;24;23 - 00;05;29;05
Speaker 2
Down there and Manhattan further back. This is all part of the shoreline of Brooklyn.

00;05;30;02 - 00;05;32;09
Speaker 3
Oh, your dad built a house here in 52?

00;05;32;10 - 00;05;32;21
Speaker 2
Yes.

00;05;33;02 - 00;05;36;29
Speaker 3
Was he like, where are they coming out from the city or from somewhere else? I got you.

00;05;37;01 - 00;05;55;15
Speaker 2
Who's going to be our summer place? And we he it. You know, him and a couple of firemen helped out, and they. They had a summer bungalow for seven of us and bunk beds and back to the beach. Every every day. And it was. It was just a nice place to be.

00;05;56;08 - 00;06;02;28
Speaker 3
Wow. So it sounds like you have a history in your family with people working in Fire and Rescue and things like that, right?

00;06;03;01 - 00;06;13;04
Speaker 2
Yes, of my my dad and my two brothers are on a fire department. I'm the last one that's still active. Yeah. Everybody else is retired.

00;06;13;12 - 00;06;19;01
Speaker 3
And thank you for your service. It's such a huge, huge thing for communities to have people like you serving, you know?

00;06;19;02 - 00;06;29;02
Speaker 2
Yeah. A and there's a lot of cops and firemen that live in this community. So it's a real work ethic type of community that it does work. They rely on each other.

00;06;29;13 - 00;06;43;12
Speaker 3
Yeah. Well, and I'm wondering if communities like this just are going to recover faster because of that, You know what I mean? Yeah, people kind of from the ground up and a lot of, like you said, blue collar workers, a lot of police and fire and very civic minded people, right?

00;06;43;13 - 00;07;00;11
Speaker 2
Yes. Hands on. They want to help. And neighbors helping neighbors has always been, you know, the backbone of this community. I think we're down in Rockaway here for I grew up down here. So I kind of seen what what can happen over the course of some bad storms.

00;07;00;12 - 00;07;05;14
Speaker 3
Yeah. So when Sandy come to you, do you think anyone had an expectation of what it would be or. Well.

00;07;05;29 - 00;07;29;11
Speaker 2
You know, we had the Hurricane Irene, I believe, which was a few months before Sandy, and it only amounted to a small amount of high winds and some flooding, but nothing major. Nobody evacuated and I think maybe got complacent when they heard about Sandy, didn't think it would be that bad.

00;07;30;16 - 00;07;32;10
Speaker 3
Almost like we did. Okay. That Irene. Well.

00;07;33;07 - 00;07;55;08
Speaker 2
That's the a lot of people thought like that. And, you know, unfortunately, people just underestimated it. I left I left when the evacuation order came and I went down. My house is a little few miles back, and I went down that morning to the ocean just to see what was what the surf looked like, because I heard the weather reports.

00;07;55;08 - 00;08;17;14
Speaker 2
It's going to be it's going to be bad. And sure enough, the surf was already up to the boardwalk, which runs parallel to the shoreline, and it was up high coming over. And I said, you know what? Let the kids and my wife, we will pack it up and closed down as best we could and went into Brooklyn.

00;08;17;22 - 00;08;18;24
Speaker 2
I got to higher ground.

00;08;18;28 - 00;08;21;06
Speaker 3
And the storm really hit was it a monday night? Is that right?

00;08;21;07 - 00;08;21;25
Speaker 2
Yes, it was.

00;08;21;26 - 00;08;23;14
Speaker 3
So did you leave on Sunday, then?

00;08;23;23 - 00;08;27;22
Speaker 2
No, I left in the morning of that Monday morning.

00;08;27;23 - 00;08;30;25
Speaker 3
Okay. I got you two. You got a good maybe ten, 12 hours before.

00;08;30;26 - 00;08;34;25
Speaker 2
Yeah, because I kind of had seen what the ocean was looking like.

00;08;34;29 - 00;08;37;02
Speaker 3
I saw. And you're like, This hasn't played out. This isn't.

00;08;37;02 - 00;08;44;24
Speaker 2
Good. So we already had a little bit of water coming up a ground water. And I said, You know what? I think we should move.

00;08;45;17 - 00;09;10;24
Hal Needham
Jim's perspective that Hurricane Irene's minimal damage in the area led to complacency when Superstorm Sandy came. Mirrors what we see in other coastal communities that weather one or more coastal storms without major problems then are threatened by a much more severe storm and inflict a lot of damages or even loss of life. Irene struck the year before Sandy in August of 2011.

00;09;10;24 - 00;09;37;27
Hal Needham
Sandy struck in October of 2012. Jim also mentioned that his family evacuated on Monday morning around 10 to 12 hours before the worst conditions of Superstorm Sandy struck. After looking at the water conditions for himself, he decided he wanted to get his family out of harm's way. This brings up an interesting point that sometimes we can evacuate as late as the morning of a big storm, although experts often recommend an earlier evacuation.

00;09;38;04 - 00;09;59;21
Hal Needham
As long as you keep situational awareness and are familiar with your evacuation route, Livvy leaving the morning of a big storm can still be a good option in many cases. In the aftermath of Hurricane Ian in southwest Florida, many experts were saying that people still could have gotten out of harm's way in the storm surge zone. The morning that Ian struck around 7 to 10 hours before landfall.

00;10;00;06 - 00;10;24;16
Hal Needham
If your community or evacuation route are not yet flooded, you often still have time to get out. My conversation with Jim continued as he described that the densely constructed homes helped fire spread during Superstorm Sandy. We also observed flood adaptations like elevated air conditioner units, raised foundations and the use of flood vents everywhere.

00;10;24;28 - 00;10;26;08
Speaker 2
Houses so close together.

00;10;26;22 - 00;10;31;23
Speaker 3
So a lot of the fires were here. And the fact that the houses were so close together that that helped them spread pretty quickly.

00;10;31;23 - 00;10;53;05
Speaker 2
Yes, without a doubt. That's what happened down here. This whole section here is it's called the wedge area, because it's constructed with larger groups of homes going into smaller groups of homes. They call this the wedge area. And then it was so close together, it majority of fires were in this in this area here. And going down the walk.

00;10;53;05 - 00;10;53;28
Speaker 2
How close they are?

00;10;54;19 - 00;11;02;29
Speaker 3
Yeah, they're very close together. And not just with the winds of Sandy. Those those embers are just going from one half to the next. Yes, sure. Yeah.

00;11;03;26 - 00;11;11;12
Speaker 2
You know, small bungalows, wood frame. So it did spread pretty quickly, which could've been wood construction.

00;11;12;14 - 00;11;16;03
Speaker 3
So here's the it looks like is that an air conditioner unit that's up high. Right.

00;11;16;03 - 00;11;18;06
Speaker 2
So yeah, everybody's been doing that now.

00;11;18;14 - 00;11;23;04
Speaker 3
They're getting it up above potential flood water. I probably would not have seen that before. Hurricane Sandy know.

00;11;23;05 - 00;11;35;18
Speaker 2
And you can see the foundation is up a little higher. And the openings here, a lot of these new construction, you have to have these flood day flood vents. So in case of another flood, it just comes in and goes out the same way.

00;11;36;01 - 00;11;38;11
Speaker 3
Instead of taking down the house intact with the water.

00;11;38;11 - 00;11;41;06
Speaker 2
Kind of it's a new, new part of the construction.

00;11;42;09 - 00;11;59;23
Speaker 3
Yeah. And I think that's what we're seeing. Some people are saying, you know, I really want to live in that community because you might go 50, 60, 100 years until you have another big event. So there's a lot of great family fun you can have down by the beach in that amount of time. Right. But at some point, people are saying, well, we still want to live there.

00;11;59;23 - 00;12;01;27
Speaker 3
We just have to maybe adapt right away.

00;12;03;03 - 00;12;14;24
Speaker 2
Yeah. People, you know, they have roots in the community. You know, people are like, you know, my son's going to be getting on the fire department soon, so we're not leaving. You know, you want to be around our family. I think a lot of people feel the same way.

00;12;15;11 - 00;12;19;00
Speaker 3
You know, that makes perfect sense. And it seems like a great community and a great place to be.

00;12;20;06 - 00;12;46;21
Hal Needham
Jimmy explains that most of the elevated homes in the area were raised after Sandy. He also clarified that Sandy's floodwater was highly contaminated with sewage from cesspools that the floodwater lifted up. Our listeners should keep in mind if you decide to stay for a large flood and for a large flood event in your community, not only are you fighting to stay above the floodwater and not drown the water you're waiting or swimming in, May be highly contaminated.

00;12;47;02 - 00;12;50;21
Speaker 3
Where there some houses that were raised before Sandy or it was it pretty much all afterwards.

00;12;50;27 - 00;13;08;09
Speaker 2
Pretty much after the people, you know, they saw what happened and worried were just that they needed to do something if they wanted to stay. Some people sold and didn't didn't come back and sold the house. They didn't want to be part of it again if something like that happened.

00;13;08;14 - 00;13;16;19
Speaker 3
Yeah. Yeah. It's just so devastating. Yeah, well, it's not just flood water, it's there's mud and pollution and chemicals, and it's just such a mess.

00;13;16;20 - 00;13;27;09
Speaker 2
Yes. And this, you know, this community is they don't have a septic system, so everybody has cesspools.

00;13;27;16 - 00;13;27;24
Speaker 3
Yeah.

00;13;27;25 - 00;13;41;04
Speaker 2
In and around their property. And what really happened was that the storm surge and the heavy water sometimes lifted up some of those cesspools. And so you had all that. Yeah.

00;13;41;22 - 00;13;43;17
Speaker 3
So all that contamination? Yeah.

00;13;44;04 - 00;14;05;12
Hal Needham
Another adaptation Jim showed me where concrete walls that were built around many houses in the community. Some people installed a platform that looked like a large patio on top of these walls and then elevated their homes. On top of that, others kept their home at the same ground level, with hopes that the new concrete wall would keep the floodwater out devastated.

00;14;05;29 - 00;14;09;27
Speaker 3
So. So how high did the water come in and did it just wash a lot of houses away?

00;14;09;29 - 00;14;40;24
Speaker 2
It was a lot of houses away. Further down here. And a lot of people put in these concrete walls on both sides. My neighbor, whose house was really devastated and he was able to through the femur and build it back and able to raise it. And then he just finished actually working on about a year ago and just got built, built everything up.

00;14;41;02 - 00;14;44;26
Speaker 3
I see. And so these walls are these walls pretty new, Like sea walls.

00;14;44;26 - 00;14;46;10
Speaker 2
Like fairly. Yeah, fairly.

00;14;46;18 - 00;15;02;12
Hal Needham
After seeing these adaptations in the densely populated area, Jim took me to a location farther out, right along the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. He explained how the U.S. Army Corps had build a jetty out here in the 1930s to help capture sand and build up the coastline.

00;15;03;01 - 00;15;14;26
Speaker 3
Really in the Rockaways, very close to the Atlantic Ocean. And Jim was explaining that the sand you see here was really captured by a U.S. Army Corps jetty that was put in in the 1930s to capture the sand And this area.

00;15;15;04 - 00;15;41;25
Speaker 2
Yeah, that's the olive product of that jetty, which is about a mile and a half to the west. And it captured all this sand and these dunes were would help stem some of the water. And it's about a quarter of a mile walk now from from the houses to to the ocean where it used to be, uh, maybe 500 yards to the to the ocean.

00;15;41;25 - 00;15;45;07
Speaker 2
So they really knew early on that they needed to do something.

00;15;45;13 - 00;15;52;23
Speaker 3
So they studied the currents and thought if we put a jetty in a certain place, it'll capture the sand here. And so this has actually built land in this part of the Rockaways.

00;15;52;24 - 00;16;18;12
Speaker 2
Yeah, the they built it where the bay meets the ocean. So you got Jamaica Bay to the west and then the Atlantic Ocean coming in. And that New York channel is an instance of the New York Harbor. The Jamaica Bay meets that. And it's a swirling area of of surf and water that it would be the perfect spot to put a jetty just to stop that water from coming in.

00;16;18;12 - 00;16;21;01
Speaker 2
And taking all the sand out, which was doing.

00;16;21;01 - 00;16;36;27
Speaker 3
Over the years. So it really built up a lot of the sand and the coastal area here. This is in the Rockaways, very close to the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, right behind that do it is the Atlantic. So it really built out this area. And then you can see there's a lot of houses that have been built here as well.

00;16;37;15 - 00;16;39;04
Speaker 3
You know, from that perspective, sure.

00;16;39;27 - 00;16;45;13
Speaker 2
It was the design that they put these dunes into to help stem the storm.

00;16;45;14 - 00;16;50;00
Speaker 3
So the water from Sandy is really coming from the Atlantic. Right. So it was coming this way.

00;16;50;01 - 00;16;57;11
Speaker 2
Oh, the storm surge was I wouldn't call it a tidal wave, but it was a surge that just unimpeded. It came right through.

00;16;57;13 - 00;16;59;28
Speaker 3
Pre sandy where the dunes this high or they don't build.

00;16;59;28 - 00;17;03;16
Speaker 2
Up. Not at all. They slowly were built up over over the years.

00;17;03;19 - 00;17;06;27
Speaker 3
So when Sandy came you said you looked at the water. Did you come down here?

00;17;06;28 - 00;17;10;01
Speaker 2
No, I was at my house on 1/26 Street further down.

00;17;10;03 - 00;17;14;12
Speaker 3
I see. Okay. But you could see the water, just the motion of it. And it was moving.

00;17;14;12 - 00;17;27;22
Speaker 2
It was coming up. It started to come through the seawall that was that was built. And I decided maybe I should heed the evacuation order that the city had put in, but I decided to leave.

00;17;29;08 - 00;17;51;14
Hal Needham
We concluded our walk around Breezy Point with a visit to the new flood mark sign that FEMA installed after Sandy. The sign shows a bright red line at nine feet above ground level that reads October 29th, 2012. On this day, hurricane sandy brought a storm surge of nine feet to this community. As indicated by the red line above.

00;17;52;07 - 00;18;19;23
Hal Needham
I absolutely love high water marks and communities as it sends a very clear message to residents about how high water has previously reached in historic floods. My own community of Galveston, Texas, has a post downtown that has the high water marks from six previous storms. This this high watermark sign, coupled with all the flood adaptations I saw on the ground, gave me hope that a future superstorm Sandy will do less damage than the 110 years ago in this area.

00;18;20;15 - 00;18;30;05
Speaker 2
So the main shopping area here and there will remember this for a while. But this shop.

00;18;30;05 - 00;18;36;05
Speaker 3
Well, Jim, could you stand next to that sign just for just for scale? I mean, look at that high watermark.

00;18;36;14 - 00;18;41;07
Speaker 2
They said that. So remember, it's everybody that comes down to visit now.

00;18;41;15 - 00;18;53;05
Speaker 3
Wow. So nine feet of water on this day. Hurricane Sandy brought a storm surge of nine feet to the community, as indicated by the red line. I mean, if you next to it, I mean, you'd get several feet over your head.

00;18;53;05 - 00;18;56;19
Speaker 2
Yes. So that's how much water was down here.

00;18;57;20 - 00;19;25;06
Hal Needham
After my adventure with Jim, I met with Barry Lipski, president of Lipski Building Construction, Inc. This family owned business has been building high quality construction on Long Island for at least 65 years or three generations. They're a full service general contracting and construction management firm with a track record of building a wide range of projects, including residential schools, condominiums, office buildings, commercial real estate and historic restoration.

00;19;25;16 - 00;19;49;21
Hal Needham
We met at their office in Bayport, a bayfront community in South Central Long Island, around 50 miles east northeast of where I met Jim in Breezy Point. Barry is a multidimensional person as he's a general contractor as well as a first responder EMT and a very passionate long distance runner. He had profound perspectives about the impacts of Superstorm Sandy from many different angles.

00;19;50;18 - 00;19;52;12
Speaker 3
So this is a Superstorm Sandy story.

00;19;52;12 - 00;20;17;14
Speaker 4
From yeah, from the point of view of first responders. Okay, I'm at the fire department. We have a water rescue division in the fire department. So at 2 a.m. that evening, which was probably October 30th, 2012, if I recall, we got a call for the fire department. It was a a duty that we had at the south end of Bayport, which is alongside the water.

00;20;17;15 - 00;20;52;13
Speaker 4
We have the Great South Bay out here, which was greatly affected by the storm. So we arrived there. We were summoned to a two story house that was on the water, on the bay. There's a quadriplegic elderly man that live there and the water was starting to come up to the house. The residents were concerned about getting him up to the second floor because of the storm surge that was just starting about 2 a.m. So what we were getting was a lot of wind coming from the south direction and water was starting to increase in the elevation on the streets.

00;20;53;11 - 00;21;16;12
Speaker 4
So when I got out of the fire truck, I was wearing full dive gear and the water in the street was about above my knees when I walked up to the house. So I got into the house. I'm also an EMT, so I treated the patient, got him stabilized. Now, two of us were able to get him on a stretcher and bring him to the second floor.

00;21;16;12 - 00;21;36;07
Speaker 4
So 40 minutes, let's say, from the time we got there to the time we were able to say, okay, he's stable now. We could leave the house. So as I left the house and get a restored full day of gear, as I left the house, I looked to the south and I could feel the water coming towards me and the streets.

00;21;36;07 - 00;21;55;27
Speaker 4
And the water now was up to the top of my chest. So within that 45 minute period of time, it basically came up 2 to 3 feet. And you could see the storm, the water surging going, It's moving. Yeah, Oh, yeah, it's moving as flooding the streets further and further to the north. So that was one of the experience that I had.

00;21;55;27 - 00;22;03;15
Speaker 3
So you were able to get this guy out, but it took you maybe a little while to get him up in that time that you got him up in elevation. The water came up. You said 2 to 3 feet.

00;22;03;16 - 00;22;08;06
Speaker 4
It came two or three feet and you could see it surging from the bay onto the streets.

00;22;08;09 - 00;22;15;13
Speaker 3
So how many how many legs, search and rescue were needed? I mean, how many people needed it desperately get up in elevation like that where there.

00;22;15;13 - 00;22;25;25
Speaker 4
Are many here, not too many. You had areas that were much further west of us.

00;22;25;25 - 00;22;28;10
Speaker 3
You mean getting in towards like Queens and.

00;22;28;27 - 00;23;04;08
Speaker 4
Their their experiences were considerably different than ours. You can take what I did. Multiply times 10,000. Yeah, that's what they were experiencing. And their population was a lot more dense as well. So, you know, the density of population and the height of the storm was considerably much higher. So we may have gotten five feet of water here on the south end of Bayport, whereas they may have gotten nine or ten feet for, you know, like a mile into shore, which affected tens of thousands of homes in general.

00;23;04;08 - 00;23;10;05
Speaker 3
Do you think that most of the people were really blindsided by Sandy's water level, like they just didn't anticipate it would be that high?

00;23;11;05 - 00;23;23;14
Speaker 4
They did not anticipate it. I mean, I left the firehouse, let's say, at nine, 10:00 that night, we were on standby. The fire department said everybody can go home. I remember looking at the chief and said, I'm sure I'll see you later this morning.

00;23;23;23 - 00;23;25;17
Speaker 3
You kind of knew this is going to be a bad.

00;23;25;19 - 00;23;30;23
Speaker 4
Oh, yes, Yeah, yeah. I was just watching the weather reports. I knew this was going to go bad. So.

00;23;31;02 - 00;23;39;09
Speaker 3
You know, so down to Breezy Point to have these fires, Right. Was that because, like, the electricity was on and cod or because of natural gas or do you know why that.

00;23;39;16 - 00;23;46;25
Speaker 4
There were I believe they were all electrical fires. They were because it flooded everything, all the transformers, everything shorted out and cause fires.

00;23;47;01 - 00;23;55;16
Speaker 3
Do you think like in a in a similar storm in the future there would be changes like to having maybe like electricity turned off in certain places? Or do you feel like this is pretty much inevitable?

00;23;55;26 - 00;24;21;02
Speaker 4
Well, where my real job as a general contractor, everything I just describe to you as a first responder, an EMT is a volunteer. Sure. So my real job is I'm a general contractor. We do a lot of public works and residential work and commercial work very varied. So after the storm hit, we were actually in a very good position to do the reconstruction work for the government on residential homes.

00;24;21;23 - 00;24;46;16
Speaker 4
There's a mix there. It's like a hybrid type of project. So we were one of the contractors chosen originally by the New York City Housing departments that we're used to to rapidly fix up the houses. Rapid repairs, I think is what they called it. So we actually were assigned to the island of Broad Channel. So Broad Channel was pretty much all underwater.

00;24;47;05 - 00;25;19;03
Speaker 4
You had to look it from a helicopter, look down, Everything was flooded. So we were assigned to that area. I remember we got there and we had about 200 houses to to do work on emergency work. And by the time we left, we did 450 homes in 90 days. So we had to rebuild and especially heat electric and the power and get the places cleaned up so that they could be habitable temporarily so residents can move back in again.

00;25;19;10 - 00;25;23;21
Speaker 4
So destroyed, you know, infrastructure and everything. So it took several years thereafter.

00;25;23;23 - 00;25;28;23
Speaker 3
What was the biggest challenge with those immediate rebuild heat electric?

00;25;29;09 - 00;25;32;29
Speaker 4
That's mainly the biggest challenge because people were freezing and that.

00;25;32;29 - 00;25;36;29
Speaker 3
Was because this was really into November and December. A lot of the recovery rate or the. Yeah.

00;25;37;08 - 00;26;15;17
Speaker 4
The recovery, the the initial storm wasn't too bad end of October, but the resources between the local town and county, city, state and federal government were very limited. So I order to organize such a huge undertaking. It took several months. So the people didn't have places to go, so they were freezing. There were people sleeping in cars. I remember seeing as I walked down the streets in a town called Lindenhurst on Long Island, those people with large garbage cans that were burning, things just to stay warm while they're sleeping in their cars.

00;26;15;17 - 00;26;24;23
Speaker 3
So they're like they're working on their house, but they don't have any heat in there. They don't really have a choice. Right. So they're they're burning things. They're staying in cars or doing what they can to stay warm here.

00;26;24;23 - 00;26;36;08
Speaker 4
Except they really weren't working. This was too big for them. These this situation, the whole room was too enormous for any individual to even help themselves.

00;26;36;09 - 00;26;44;10
Speaker 3
So they might just be completely overwhelmed by I don't know, I don't have anywhere to go. I can't really stay in my house because I'm freezing and they're just trying to survive one day at a time.

00;26;44;23 - 00;26;52;05
Speaker 4
Pretty much the Red Cross was there trying to help them day to day. Gasoline wasn't available, so lines were tremendously long.

00;26;52;28 - 00;26;57;11
Speaker 3
Even if you had a generator, you're waiting for 4 hours for gas to run it.

00;26;57;13 - 00;27;07;27
Speaker 4
Even if they had a generator, they didn't have gas to run it, know they had it made on these lines that were hours long. You know, food stores were closed, the electricity was out. It was a mess. It was pretty bad down there.

00;27;08;07 - 00;27;17;28
Speaker 3
So, man, I'm trying to wrap my head around this and how the progress was made. Like, was it what were some of the key things to getting progress in getting these homes?

00;27;18;06 - 00;27;55;02
Speaker 4
Well, electricity, you know, we all depend on electric. You know, we don't have big stacks, a lot of like these to having the good old days with or various other places. No, I got a thing. So it all electric people were freezing. So that was a primary. Once the utilities were able to get electric and there was a process which took many years, including today, which is November of 2021, where we're still working for the government, raising houses, rebuilding their houses so that people can now not only just move into home, but have a lot of resiliency so that the storm hits again.

00;27;55;16 - 00;28;21;06
Speaker 4
They could be in a much better position than they were before the storm hit. There's a pretty good example in town. I mentioned to you, Lindenhurst, we were visiting several of the towns to see what kind of devastation it was several days after the storm. And I remember walking, it was it was an evening like about 5:00 and starting to get dark, walking down the streets to Lindenhurst.

00;28;21;06 - 00;28;49;13
Speaker 4
And the houses were devastated. The people asleep in their cars at burning stuff in the garbage cans. And we got to the water. All the houses were wrecked except for one. I could see the silhouette, the dark silhouette of this one house. And we're looking at it wondering why is that house still intact? And that damage as we got closer to it, because my brother and I, we both looked at it, we stared at each other and said, we built that house ten years ago.

00;28;49;13 - 00;28;49;24
Speaker 4
Really?

00;28;49;24 - 00;28;51;05
Speaker 3
So it was just it was built better.

00;28;51;05 - 00;29;09;15
Speaker 4
We built we had raised the house back then and built it with hurricane sustaining windows and a lot of other measures to protect against a potential storm. And lo and behold, the house was intact. Their boat got destroyed.

00;29;10;09 - 00;29;13;28
Speaker 3
Yeah. So it showed the conditions were severe around it, but they were up and they were strong.

00;29;13;28 - 00;29;23;05
Speaker 4
Absolutely. We were cut out laughing amongst all the devastation, you know, that we actually put something up here that was so, so far superior.

00;29;23;05 - 00;29;25;20
Speaker 3
There's no better testimony than surviving the storm, you know?

00;29;25;22 - 00;29;28;18
Speaker 4
And now every house looks like their house today.

00;29;28;26 - 00;29;31;24
Speaker 3
And so now they're built to that standard or more.

00;29;31;26 - 00;29;41;09
Speaker 4
Right now, we rebuild these houses. I'm going to get someone in here a few minutes to give you more details. But, you know, we do things like raise all the utilities up, not in the basement anymore.

00;29;41;22 - 00;29;45;22
Speaker 3
You're getting the air conditioner, whatever the electrical and all that stuff up.

00;29;45;28 - 00;29;58;17
Speaker 4
Right. You know, the basements now are not considered basements. They got to be break away walls. So if a flood comes in, it goes through the bottom of the house and comes out the other side, does a little bit of damage, but not much.

00;29;58;17 - 00;29;59;07
Speaker 3
Are flood vents.

00;29;59;07 - 00;30;19;13
Speaker 4
Required? Oh, yes. Yeah. And this fellow, Rob, is going to come in and give you more details about all the residences We've worked on, about 650 houses since the storm. Four storm resistant type of work. So it was big and we're only one contractor. So there's, you know, tens of thousands of homes worked on.

00;30;19;25 - 00;30;26;06
Speaker 3
Did did the FEMA base flood elevation change? Did they did the requirement of how you needed to be changed after the storm?

00;30;26;10 - 00;30;47;17
Speaker 4
Well, every building apartment is different and the base flood elevation mark is a distinction which is used as a benchmark for each town to tell you when you're building a new house or moving or raising a house, you need to be X number of feet above that. And depending upon the town, they'll tell you where they want your house.

00;30;47;17 - 00;30;48;02
Speaker 4
At this point.

00;30;48;08 - 00;30;50;22
Speaker 3
Do you see some people saying they want to go even higher than the.

00;30;50;22 - 00;30;53;12
Speaker 4
Required? Oh, very many times. Okay.

00;30;53;15 - 00;30;57;18
Speaker 3
So they're saying I don't even want to cut it that close. I want a buffer. I don't want to ever go through that again.

00;30;57;19 - 00;31;14;20
Speaker 4
You know, one of my sons lives on a canal that was greatly affected by the storm back then. And we're raising his house right now as we speak. And he's, I think, a foot or two above the base flood elevation requirements. Yeah.

00;31;14;20 - 00;31;20;17
Speaker 3
Sometimes it just makes sense to go and maybe an extra footer here. Right. And all of a sudden you're putting in a buffer for sure, you know.

00;31;20;27 - 00;31;24;26
Speaker 4
Yeah. Because, you know, we don't think things are going to get better. They're probably just going to get worse.

00;31;25;04 - 00;31;34;00
Speaker 3
What do you think? Say someone in South Carolina or South Florida or whatever could could learn from the Sandy story and what you guys are doing here with how you're building now.

00;31;34;11 - 00;31;56;09
Speaker 4
What we learn from them, the differences, the density of population, I mean, the density as you go west of here is just everybody's on top of each other. It's a city, you know, the infrastructure is so much more complicated. You know, when they have storms in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, you know, the devastation is the same, but the density is so much less.

00;31;56;24 - 00;32;10;13
Speaker 4
So our issues here are more complex, aided by the, you know, the complex nature of all these infrastructure issues. And the population is so much greater in such a small area.

00;32;10;13 - 00;32;26;07
Speaker 3
You know, I was thinking about that Breezy Point fire today and I thought if this happened in Texas, you know, you have one house per acre, per half acre. So, I mean, so the embers are spreading like that. I mean, I was in this neighborhood where literally all the houses are touching. So if your neighbor's house is burning, your house is going to burn.

00;32;26;07 - 00;32;26;16
Speaker 3
Right.

00;32;26;16 - 00;32;44;00
Speaker 4
So, yeah, breezy, Breezy Point is just to the southwest of Broad Channel where we were working. So, you know, I saw all the damage there. And I know a lot of people that live there. They were, you know, in those homes. You know, it started off with one house catching on fire and then it spreading to the other houses because of wind.

00;32;44;23 - 00;32;51;15
Speaker 4
And then you have the complication where the fire trucks couldn't get down the streets to put the fire out. There's was plenty of water, but it was on the ground.

00;32;51;17 - 00;32;53;18
Speaker 3
Yeah, salt water on the ground. Yeah. Yeah.

00;32;53;18 - 00;33;02;10
Speaker 4
So it's got very precarious and there's a lot a lot of city firemen that live there. But even with their experience, without the equipment, they can't put the fire out.

00;33;02;23 - 00;33;10;09
Speaker 3
Do you think anything's changed as far as like different ways to approach a storm like that in the future? As far from a like the emergency management perspective.

00;33;11;23 - 00;33;16;11
Speaker 4
I'm not sure what the New York City Fire Department would be doing different. I'm not privy to that. Yeah.

00;33;17;24 - 00;33;22;04
Speaker 3
But these were really challenging conditions. You know, no matter how well you're prepared for.

00;33;22;08 - 00;33;27;03
Speaker 4
Of course, you know, everything is you know, Mother Nature is very difficult to control.

00;33;27;10 - 00;33;29;05
Speaker 3
Yeah, for sure.

00;33;29;05 - 00;33;34;15
Speaker 4
You know, what we're doing from the point of view of construction is very different so that, you know, we can talk to you about some more.

00;33;34;29 - 00;33;48;23
Hal Needham
While meeting with Barry at Lipski Constructions Bay Port Office, Robert Wolff, project manager at Lipski, is joining us to discuss some more insights about how they adapt construction projects for coastal flooding. I recorded some of our conversation.

00;33;48;23 - 00;34;08;09
Speaker 3
Robert, appreciate you taking time. You know, we're just trying to understand lessons learned, like how do we build better to prepare for storm surge events, coastal flooding events, things like that? What have you learned or like what do you practice here as far as building? Better to get out ahead of these storms and, you know, reduce the losses once the storm hit?

00;34;08;09 - 00;34;28;09
Speaker 4
Yeah, So we did a lot of work with the new Horizon program, the governor's Office of Storm Recovery. And what we did is we elevated existing homes that were affected throughout the the storms and the flooding. So what they did is they took the homes and they brought them up to an elevation that is at or above where the previous flood waters were.

00;34;28;11 - 00;34;49;11
Speaker 4
And typically what FEMA requires that the houses get raised at least two feet higher than where the floodwaters were. So municipalities required to go four feet higher. So we took the existing houses, picked them up, put new foundations under them, put heeled the piles down the ground, because typically these these houses are located along the coast where the soils are aren't very good.

00;34;49;27 - 00;35;19;20
Speaker 4
So we put helical piles to stabilize the foundations and bring the houses up to a high level once or at a higher level. We take all the mechanicals and we bring all the mechanicals up to that base point elevation so that water flood waters do come through again. They're not affected by the water. In addition, the foundations that we put in, either we do a close foundation or something called a flood vent, which allows the waves of water to actually come into the foundation.

00;35;20;24 - 00;35;39;23
Speaker 4
The area of the house that was, you know, is basically a crawl space that allows the water to come out after the storm subsides. We've also done some houses on Fire Island that we've built in hocus pocus, which are basically like telephone poles, same principle water. This rushes underneath the house, water rushes out and the houses.

00;35;40;03 - 00;35;41;02
Speaker 3
The water can really flow.

00;35;41;02 - 00;36;13;21
Speaker 4
Through, water flows right through. And that the closer that you get the water and of course that you get to open water, they require wave action mitigation. So there's a lot of damage that occurs just by the waves pounding against the foundations, against the houses. So when a highway of action location, you have to have piles. You can't have a closed foundation because it's just too much pressure, water pressure on the foundation to suddenly go to a pile type of path.

00;36;13;24 - 00;36;41;13
Speaker 4
And so they've done these with Iowa water systems, their septic systems. They've called on innovative alternative onsite water treatment systems. They're basically designed to get the septic out of the the low lying water levels. So what they do is a very shallow septic system that will allow the septic system to work properly of, you know, high ground water.

00;36;42;02 - 00;37;01;22
Speaker 4
So that's something new that's coming along as well. I mean, this pallet is taking it upon themselves to raise the roads. The rest of the the drainage systems, you know, put all the utilities up high. There's a lot of things that they've done through the new uprising program and the infrastructure programs that are kind of mitigating this.

00;37;02;01 - 00;37;06;01
Speaker 3
Are there cases where they would want walls to break away, like if water floods?

00;37;06;01 - 00;37;27;18
Speaker 4
You know, yes, we just put the house in Blue Point like that. So it's the same pile type system that I described. They're built on cement, piers. But in between the cement piers is a what they call a breakaway wall. So it gives the appearance of a close foundation. But in actuality, it allows the water just to knock down the break point walls and just rush into that.

00;37;27;19 - 00;37;32;07
Speaker 3
Okay. So The water could again flow without putting a lot of pressure and make a building.

00;37;32;07 - 00;37;53;08
Speaker 4
Collapse, correct? Yeah. It's again, it gives the appearance of a closed foundation, which esthetically is more pleasing than having a house up on pylons. Typically, you know, a residential neighborhood, houses along the beach, you're used to seeing houses up on piles, but we're not really to seeing that whole now. So they've done this pretty white wall design, which seems to accomplish the same thing.

00;37;53;10 - 00;38;12;16
Speaker 4
Yeah. So what Their new building code requires very heavy striping there. They require a continuous load path from the, from the roof of peak of the roof all the way down to the foundation and below so that no area of the house becomes a weak link that could possibly break away. So again.

00;38;12;18 - 00;38;13;22
Speaker 3
Strapping over the top of the.

00;38;13;22 - 00;38;34;24
Speaker 4
Roof, they strapped the roof rafters to the to the to the walls. They strapped the first level to the second level, and then they dropped the first level down to the foundation. And then the foundation ultimately is either three feet below grade or as attempts to build the piles. So it's virtually impossible for the now that pieces of the house to even blow off.

00;38;35;00 - 00;38;38;26
Speaker 3
You know, you have this continuous load path that doesn't allow a lead point then, correct.

00;38;39;03 - 00;38;44;01
Speaker 4
The whole house as a unit would have to blow away inclusive of its foundation, which is highly unlikely and possible.

00;38;44;21 - 00;38;50;07
Speaker 3
How much of that is really post-Sandy and how much of that was kind of the thinking was already there before Sandy? Yeah, I think.

00;38;50;07 - 00;39;09;19
Speaker 4
They've learned the lessons through a lot of the stuff that's going on in Florida. In Florida, you know, a lot of the hurricane action and they've learned some hard lessons. So we brought that up. And now that we're experiencing more of the hurricanes more often, those building codes in our part of the state building code and it's become commonplace.

00;39;09;19 - 00;39;23;02
Speaker 4
But these houses that we've been elevating didn't have those old building codes or straps in place. So now, as we do elevate them, we take the siding off them, we take the shooting off them and we strap them properly in addition to raising them.

00;39;24;10 - 00;39;48;07
Hal Needham
Thanks, guys, for taking time to come on the Track podcast. I learned so much from these conversations with our guest in this episode. Jim helped me see that complacency found along the lucky coastlines that sometimes escaped destruction from a previous storm happens in many different geographies. He shared how people were unprepared for Sandy because Hurricane Irene, the year before, did not inflict severe impacts on the area.

00;39;48;18 - 00;40;13;03
Hal Needham
This was a similar perspective of the communities I worked with in South Florida following Hurricane Ian walking around Breezy Point with Jim showed me the extent of adaptations implemented to mitigate against future coastal flood events. Residents install concrete walls and flood vents and sometimes elevated homes above future floodwaters. I was also amazed at the amount of sand captured along the coast near the U.S. Army Corps jetty.

00;40;13;19 - 00;40;39;19
Hal Needham
That area built extensively, providing a broad area of sand and dunes, a large area where a playground is now located, and in general, a land growth buffer to protect homeowners from future flooding. Truly, this area is taking flood resiliency seriously and implementing multiple lines of defense. The interview with Barry Lipski Help me understand what Sandy was like on the ground and give me insights on how we can build better.

00;40;39;29 - 00;41;04;09
Hal Needham
His flood rescue story gave me insight on how quickly water can rise. His descriptions of the weeks and months after Sandy helped me understand the hardships people endured in the storm's aftermath without electricity and heat. One of the most profound insights of the interviews at Lipski Construction was the story about how Barry and a colleague came across a home standing firm in the midst of destruction.

00;41;04;16 - 00;41;30;17
Hal Needham
Then realized that this was a home that they had actually built. He commented that many new homes in the area are now built to that standard. In a sense, the superior building practices implemented by Lipski were ahead of their time in the pre sandy era. Their excellent work proves the point of how we build matters and homes are businesses built higher and stronger will be more resilient to weather, to weather catastrophic storms.

00;41;31;06 - 00;41;51;05
Hal Needham
These interviews and my tour of the area gave me hope in a more resilient Long Island moving forward. I truly believe they're better prepared for a future Superstorm Sandy, although we all hope that that won't happen for a long, long time. Special thanks on this episode to my dear friend Linda Lubrano Ski of Long Island, who helped set up these interviews for me.

00;41;51;15 - 00;42;12;22
Hal Needham
She also provided me with a book on hurricane history in the area the first time we met. As always, I'm appreciative to our production and marketing team for disseminating such great content. They are Smith, Baker, Ashley Anderson, Jeremiah Long, Christopher Cook and Amy Wilkins. Thanks to you, our faithful listeners, for coming along on these journeys to disaster prone locations.

00;42;12;22 - 00;42;31;28
Hal Needham
I really do feel the presence of our listeners as I travel around and trust the content we produce helps feed your travel bug while helping you understand disasters better and giving practical advice to become more resilient. Until the next episode of the GEO Track podcast, this is Dr. Howell. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

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